1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to the field of cellular communications, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for employing hybrid automatic repeat requests to enhance communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
The cell phone industry is undergoing exponential growth, not only in this country, but all over the world. In fact, it is well known that the over twenty percent of the adult population in the United States does not even have a traditional landline telephone. In addition to those who do not own a conventional telephone, nearly ninety percent of the adult population owns a wireless phone (i.e. cell phone).
In addition to the growth in ownership, the usage of cell phones is increasing as well over the use of traditional landline telephone coverage. In fact, one in seven adults now uses only cell phones. Whereas in the past cell phones were used when a landline was not available or under emergency conditions, lower carrier rates, affordability of family packages, and free mobile-to-mobile or friend-to-friend promotions have fostered in significant increases in usage. It is not uncommon today to walk into any public forum or facility and notice a majority of the people there talking on their cell phones.
The ability to communicate using a mobile phone, or mobile station, has been available since the middle of the last century. However, during the 1990's so-called “2G” or second generation mobile phone systems were provided that began the growth in both deployment and usage that we currently enjoy today. These initial systems predominately provided for the routing and reliable servicing of voice calls between parties. And, as one skilled in the art will appreciate, there are a number of timing and latency requirements associated with transmission and reception of voice data in order to maintain quality of service.
During the early 2000's so-called “3G” or third generation cellular systems were fielded that have provided significant increases in user capacity, quality of service, and data rate. CDMA2000, also known as 1xRTT, is perhaps the most prevalent of these 3G systems and this protocol is well known by those in the art to provide for excellent transmission of voice and data. Yet, the demands on these systems to significantly increase coverage and user capacity is unprecedented, particularly when it is also required to maintain the same quality of service. Accordingly, those in the field of art continue to make improvements to extant mechanisms and techniques in order to achieve these goals.
One such technique that is currently fielded enables cellular providers to increase the frame error rates of links between cellular towers (i.e., base stations) and the cell phones (i.e., mobile stations) that they currently service for fundamental channels in order to increase the coverage of supplemental channels and they rely on existing error recovery mechanisms such as automatic repeat request (ARQ) prescribed in the 1xRTT protocol to maintain quality of service, but these mechanisms are known to be relatively slow and inefficient for higher frame error rates.
Accordingly, what is needed is an apparatus and method for improving cellular communications in the presence of higher frame error rates.
Additionally, what is needed is a mechanism that allows for enhanced cellular communications at higher frame error rates that is advantageous to the performance of these cellular systems over that which has heretofore been provided.
Furthermore, what is needed is a technique that provides for early termination of frame transmissions in the presence of error feedback from a receiver and which automatically schedules for retransmission of frames that have not been positively acknowledged by the receiver.